Girl’s Cakes

Hannah’s 7th birthday cheerleader cake. Figurine is entirely edible excepting pom poms and supporting toothpicks in arms and supporting skewer up through the middle of figurine. Outfit on figurine based on Buffalo Bill’s cheerleader outfit:

Cake is dark chocolate mud cake, filled and finished with dark chocolate ganache. Cake was first covered in white fondant, then red and white stripes added and “exploded”. Stars on board are made of grey fondant and hand painted in a mix of silver airbrush paint and silver hologram dust for added sparkle.

Pink flower for Maude’s 5th birthday. Cake is orange-almond gluten free, filled with white chocolate ganache – very popular flavour at the moment! Centre of cake is white pearl cachous held in place with royal icing. Board is covered in black vinyl – still working on this technique of board covering.

Charli the Cavoodle cake. Cake is dark chocolate mud with dark chocolate ganache. Head is polystyrene, supported by 15mm dowel. Tail is wired into shape. Board is covered with black vinyl – first time I have tried out this new trend in board covering, much much easier when doing a novelty cake as it removes the need for a shaped board underneath the cake. Fur is done using smallest setting with sugarcraft gun. Happy birthday Indy!

Monkey cake for Chloe’s 7th birthday. Cake is white chocolate mud filled with white chocolate ganache. Only new thing for me on this cake was that I used “solite” (a fat substitute like Crisco or softened copha) in the black fondant to help soften it for making the fur, worked beautifully. The other big discovery on this cake was the effect of humidity, even when only 20 degrees in the house – the fondant became quite sticky and shiny. Thankfully putting the AC on quite cold (18 degrees) – fixed this issue almost instantly. Within 5 minutes the shininess was gone and within 20 minutes the fondant had “set” again. Phew!

Crocodile cake for Tara’s 3rd birthday. Whole thing is edible, carved out of dark chocolate mud cake. The arms and legs are actually made out of cake pop mix as it is very easy to shape and mold. The rest is cake. The mouth is held open using a cake board inserted on an angle and held up using dowels which are then hidden using fondant and ganache. This cake was a very efficient use of cake, there was very little wastage and offcuts because of using the cake pop mix, and those sections of the cake went down very well with party-goers too. I think this was better than purely fondant arms and legs (which I was considering) because that becomes too much fondant and people don’t like to eat huge chunks of fondant (even kids!). I will definitely use this technique again. Crocodile “skin” was done using a fondant mat designed for created a “stone” look which I used on Gracie’s castle cake. Colour was a basis of Wilton juniper green with a mix of yellow and kelly green, then the whole cake was brushed with a green petal dust to create the “mottled” look. Eyes and teeth were deliberately “cartoonish” so as to avoid the kids being scared of the cake .

Dora Dora Dora the Explorer! 3D Dora cake sitting up. New element on this cake for me was a non-edible item – her head! Because of Dora’s proportions – her head is much bigger than the rest of her body – trying to make her head edible did not work out for me! I tried using LCMs as per previous cakes but the volume was just too large and it fell apart. The solution was a carved styrofoam head covered in fondant, with the assistance of ganache to help stick and smooth the surface. There are also some LCMs to build up the hair at the sides because the styrofoam ball I used was not quite big enough for the whole head. All the rest is edible – legs, torso, and backpack. Construction in this cake (courtesy of my wonderful husband Will) includes a 16mm dowel straight up through the middle of Dora, and a regular cake dowel drilled into the side of the vertical dowel perpendicular just below backpack. So the torso/backpack is sitting on another cake board supported by the perpendicular dowel. Cake itself is chocolate mud and went down a treat at the party.

9/7/11 – updated photos with new photos taken in our new light tent. Big improvement!

My very first Topsy Turvy cake – also known as the Mad Hatter cake – made on a course yesterday run by Cake Decorating Solutions out at Arndell Park. New elements for me on this cake – the Topsy-Turvy shape, 3-tiers, tried out a new flavour on the top tier (caramel mud – will need to find a better recipe because it was very average), and the stripey pattern on the bottom tier. Lesson: Centre dowel very important for a 3-tier cake, especially a Topsy-Turvy made using elliptical cutting like this. I didn’t use the centre dowel on this one but will for my next one.

Some useful tips from the course: the SatinIce I used (a brand of fondant) is actually able to be refrigerated, which many fondants aren’t. This could be very useful for certain types of fresh cake that you wouldn’t usually use fondant on. When doing the striped fondant pattern, make sure your different coloured pieces of fondant are the same thickness, so you don’t get a “stepped” effect in the stripes. You can smooth small differences out using a fondant smoother but the less difference the better.

Ariel cake made for Honor’s 4th birthday, includes little figures of Sebastian and Flounder. The new elements for me for this cake were I finally did a cake where I covered a board! I deliberately didn’t fully mix in the blue colour to make it streaky like water. The other big thing for me on this cake was that this was all done in one day – baking, ganaching, and decorating including all the little pieces! Usually I spread it over a couple of days but I burnt the first cake I made and had to remake .

Everything on this cake was edible, excepting 1 wooden skewer used to hold Ariel upright and on the cake, the candles of course, and a small polystyrene ball inside Ariel’s head – to make her head lighter, and because I didn’t have enough time to make a solid fondant head which I normally would let do and let dry.

The face was much easier to do that other faces I’ve done in the past because I bought a set of food colouring markers and they were very easy to use. The “wood grain” on the treasure chest was just done with painting the chest roughly with food colouring and letting the roughness of the brush strokes create the “grain”. The pink shell was made using a shell mold, and painting with pink lustre spray. The “scales” on the tail were done by pressing the large edge of a piping tip into the fondant.